


No Matter How Loudly You Call

by black_ink_tide



Series: It Was A Heartbeat [2]
Category: Dragon Age
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-20
Updated: 2011-07-20
Packaged: 2017-10-21 14:04:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/226015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/black_ink_tide/pseuds/black_ink_tide
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to 'It Was A Heartbeat.' Written for the k-meme per a request for a Hawke that goes mad in a style not unlike Drusilla from BtVS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Matter How Loudly You Call

Her clear voice in the room is a shock, “I can’t find blue. All the blues are gone.”

“Hawke?!”

Anders darts from his seat at the table, abandoning his scrawled manifesto. Slow to react and heavy, clumsy, he takes her thin shoulders between his hands. She sits placidly in her chair, where she sits every night after dinner, her brows furrowed. And she has been silent, so painfully silent, since it happened. Since her son was taken from her. Cut from her. The first time he’s heard her speak since…

Kneeling before her, heart hammering, he takes her hearth-warm face between his cold hands, “Marian?”

She looks at him, and smiles broadly, giddily, her eyes bright and clear, “Anders, you have them inside! Silly, man. Too full and too empty.”

Ice in his curved spine, he feels his breath hitch, “I… I don’t understand--”

“The knives in the basket were rusty. They stained my skin. Copper and gold,” she nuzzles into his palm and offers both her wrists to him, “Open them up and see. All the rivers in the world, darling boy. Ribbons and daggers and little blue bows. For decorating.”

It will pass, he thinks, she just needs time. But his blood pumps cold and thick. Holding her face in his stiff, stained hands, he _doubts_.

What happened to Hawke is beyond bearing, lodged like a broken arrow in his chest. Unfair. So unfair.

He sees it again, now, smells that night, nearly three years ago now, fresh as if it just happened.

Her body lying split and hollow on a dirty floor, when he arrived she was already still, already quiet, but warm and alive beneath her shroud of wet-dark blood. Two broken mages alone, he poured everything he had into her, unable to tear his eyes away from the dark wound. He had seen wounds worse than this in the clinic and on the field. But those men were corpses. This was Hawke. Petal soft skin and cheeks that flushed pink when she lied and that strange crisp magic that was all hers, only her, fresh and clean, like seaspray at dawn…

He had looked down at her and thought, distantly and clinically, _the womb is gone_.

A strangled sob left his body. Something beyond Justice or Vengeance flared in his chest, and the chains rattled inside… his frayed control always now on the verge.

 _I will wake screaming from this nightmare_ , he had thought, he had hoped, _I will wake alone in bed. I will force the spirit down, swallow him like bile. She will be safe, full and warm far away, in a different bed with that stray dog Fenris, but whole. I will wake_.

The magic had left him, fusing broken bloodlines, knitting together what could be saved. She breathed and that alone kept him tethered.

"I will wake," he said it aloud without thinking, "we will wake up," his strained voice had been the only sound in the Amell estate.

“The salt is too sweet for me,” she whispers to him, now, behind the clinic doors. _This is a place for sick people_ , he thinks, _and here we are_. He never woke from the nightmare.

She said nothing beyond the broken fragments uttered in those first fevered days. She said his name, her son’s name. She called for him. She held him and nursed him and sang sweet little songs to him in those hallucinatory first nights, and lost him again and again and again…

Until at a certain point, Anders actually thought he had done her a disservice by pulling her back from the grave.

“I should have let her go…” he said in her room on the fourth night. She was a wet pale form in the overly large bed.

Fenris glared at him, a ghost standing beside the fire.

“It was not your choice to make,” he stated flatly, deep rings of exhaustion shadowed his face.

And then she was silent. After the fever broke. _Since_.

She had cowered from Fenris then, recoiling like a thing burned at his touch. And he vanished. _Good riddance_ , Anders had thought.

Aveline had offered to keep her, but Hawke protested, wordlessly, fighting to cling close to him. Like a child, she threw skinny white arms around his chest and hung on, face buried in the layers of his clothing. She rejected the others. She wanted to stay with him. Part of him couldn’t understand why… and another part did. Or, hoped to. She was calm only with him near, and the others came to sit her, with them, in the evenings -- A semblance of normalcy when everything was miles and miles off from normal.

But now she spoke. Physically healed, with only a broad dark scar he had tried so carefully to make clean. Her bright eyes rolled wide, glancing at the shape of the room. He could offer her so little, in this dank hole he called home.

“Where is the Prince of Cats?” she grinned broadly, conspiring, white teeth square and straight beneath her full lips, “I have a present for him.”

“W-what’s that?”

“I’m going to lick his eyes.”

“Oh.”

“So that he can see all the stars again.” She offered her delicate wrist to him again, brushing the skin against his jaw and then his slack mouth, “Go on. The water is cold but it’s fresh.”

“Hawke… do you…” he didn’t want to do this, “Do you remember?”

She pursed her lips and reclined.

“Too well.”

She plucked at the light linen of her blouse, worrying the buttons with blunt nailed fingers. She started to undo them.

“Hawke…”

“The wax is still warm, even though the candle has gone out. I saw it happen. A little column of white smoke,” she pauses to trace a zig-zagging line up towards the ceiling with her finger. Tilting face turned upward, she resumes unbuttoning slowly, “They say the smoke takes our prayers up to the Maker’s ears. I think he breathes them in, and coughs them out. And when he spits, it rains.”

White skin was exposed, the flat plane of her chest, the valley between her breasts, and her stomach, the skin folded thinly as she was curled in the chair. He knew her scar. The shape of it was burnt into his skin, his hands, his mind. Where he had sealed her up again.

He looks from the scar to her face, “I’m… sorry,” he shuddered, bowing his head, “I tried. I did the best I could--”

“Little knife hands, mage in a tower, he pulled petals off and abandoned the flower,” she cooed.

“Oh, Maker, Hawke, please, stop--”

“Stop, I said, I begged,” her voice wavered, full of quick tears, “Mother always hated beggars. Mother doesn’t hate now. And neither does he, Little Thing. But the Brother. The Brother hates, doesn’t he?”

“The, the Brother?”

She made a keening sound and launched towards him, kissing him hard on the mouth, devouring his surprised gasp, “Fix it. Fix it! The toy is broken, but you understand the gears. You love the dark inside parts. Please. Teeth of one wheel pull another along. Fix it,” she kissed him, and, hating himself for it, he kissed her back, his neck stiff, “Anders, fix it.”

“I can’t, Hawke,” he exhaled.

Her hand slipped from the side of his face, and with her eyes closed, she reached for him, brushing his length first, then taking him in her hand through his worn pants. Her hand moved slowly, calmly, and she caught his gaze with hard sapphire eyes, “A father plants seeds in the ground and little trees bursts out, and shake off their dirt when they feel the air in their leaves. Then they'll call him a farmer.”

He groaned, feeling himself grow harder against the softness of her palm, her thin white fingers.

“I can’t, Marian,” disgusted with himself, he gently pushes her back with trembling hands, “Not… not like this.”

“I’m so empty,” she releases him, and crumples into the seat, “I wasn’t always. But now I am forever.”

“I am so sorry--”

“I heard him cry. Before there was you, before your magic crawled inside me like a rodent,” she leans forward again, making a little chittering sound against his throat, “I heard him cry before he flew away in the dark. He sounded like family. I heard him cry.”

“The babe lived?? Hawke, your babe was alive??”

It might be madness… but there was a sliver of something here, a spark. He held her close, stroking her hair.

“Your bones are gold,” she murmured into his chest, “Will they melt?”

Gone. For now.

“I don’t know, Hawke, maybe they will.”

“We could make rings out of them, one for every finger, and set stars in them for stones. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

“Absolutely beautiful, Hawke.”

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from a quote from the film The Seventh Seal.
> 
> "Faith is a torment. It is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call."


End file.
